Wikinews:Water cooler/assistance

Page last updated: Tuesday 03 at {{evalx|(apply + (split (get-arg 2) ":"))|{{CU

Mailing lists

Hi @Heavy Water, @Bddpaux, @Cromium, @Chaetodipus, @JJLiu112, @LivelyRatification, @Microchip08, @RockerballAustralia, @SVTCobra, @Tom Morris, @Tyrol5 @Michael.C.Wright who was on wikibreak

I made pages here

~~User:Gryllida/Notifications/New/Develop~~

Category:Gryllida/notify/new/develop (news draft just made)

~~User:Gryllida/Notifications/New/Review~~

Category:Gryllida/notify/new/review (news just submitted for review)

Category:Gryllida/notify/new/publish (news just published)

They work like mailing list, they leave messages to talk pages. Administrator or user with "massmessage" permission can use Special:MassMessage to send message to these pages. Unfortunately only to this wiki. If you want to get notified about new drafts created or being submitted for review please ~~let me know to add you to the list~~ add your talk page to the respective category.

I expect all reviewers to action this please. Non reviewers are welcome to join too.

Notifications will be sent manually at first and then later I will write a script/bot which will need massmessage permissions.

I hope this will help to get more prompt revised articles to meet primitive requirements: "event is fresh, sources provided, 5W answered".

It is my proposal that you are only obligated to verify the 5W and not everything as this makes review a lot lighter work.

And more reviews. If everyone does one published in a week it helps. I cannot publish most as I often edit and am involved.

Note I am writing a series of tiny articles which only include 5W and nearly nothing else. They should be easy to review.

Regardless of your decision could you all please reply to this message and confirm you received it, and even better if you comment on some of the above?

Please let me know if any comments or questions. Gryllida (talk) 08:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC) Edited 09:24, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Acagastya Gryllida (talk) 08:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note, you may want to either

check your preferences to ensure new messages to your talk page generate an email, and a valid email is set. check email regularly

or

login to a wiki regularly and check notifications. ensure new messages to your talk page are set to generate a notification

Regards, 🙂 Gryllida (talk) 09:35, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

At the moment, I am able to find newly created articles without an additional system. However, I am curious about the other proposal. Is that a type of pre-review? I'd like to hear more about how it works. I'm not sure I understand it completely. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 15:28, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I recommend the following actions for reviewers, to be done immediately: CC @RockerballAustralia

1. join the so-called 'mailing lists' i linked in assistance water cooler

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/assistance#Mailing_lists
- Done by @Michael.C.Wright as checks recent changes anyway so N/A

2. confirm that you are okay establishing two new recommendations for reviewers:

only verify the 5Ws and copyright (no plagiarism) for until end of the year
- @Michael.C.Wright requested clarification, so I'll word this again: when you see article with three paragraphs, I am proposing that you only check for plagiarism and 5Ws in first paragraph being accurate, and not necessarily check the rest, in interest of freshness.
  - If any information seems unsourced, unless it is absolutely essential (i.e., part of 5Ws), it needs to be removed immediately and a note posted on talk. This should not delay the publication. The article authors or other contributors should aim to resolve the query within 24 hours of article publication.

3. subscribe to page 'assistance' of water cooler, and provide your responses (they don't have to be long; one line is sufficient) to questions asked there, checking at least twice a day.

I can't see who did this or not; please confirm it manually to me by telling 'Gryllida, I subscribed to the 'assistance' water cooler.

Please propose some other actions if you think they could help. Gryllida (talk) 02:19, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I support exploring ways to update or change the review process and I agree with taking quick and decisive action in accordance with WN:IAR.

I think we should start the conversation by listing what are the minimum components of the current review system we must keep. The top of that list must be verifiability with neutrality immediately after. If we willingly start publishing articles that are not at least verifiable, or are blatantly one-sided, then we've destroyed the project and created a source for mis/disinformation.

I do not believe the 5Ws are the core of what we should protect. But maybe I'm still not fully understanding what you are suggesting. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:21, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What to keep -- 5W in first paragraph and no plagiarism, ideally once this takes off I would like to go back to 'maximum 3 days fresh at publishing, ideally under 1 day' but this is for later - reviewer can change verb tense to match requirements - reviewer can leave comment about inverted pyramid and request a fix after publishing - is rearranging paragraphs considered a minor edit if no content was edited? - everything else optional? Thanks. :-) Gryllida (talk) 22:12, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"when you see article with three paragraphs, I am proposing that you only check for plagiarism and 5Ws in first paragraph being accurate, and not necessarily check the rest, in interest of freshness": Seriously? I'd have thought you (Gryllida) had taken from TOG's failure the same conclusion Pi and others had; an idealistic review system is what energizes the project and helps sustain it in the long term. We don't have to speculate about the impact a lax, just-check-the-basics version of review would have on en.wn — the evidence is already there.

"I think we should start the conversation by listing what are the minimum components of the current review system we must keep": That's all of them. You can't, as you (Michael) tried to, order the core review standards by importance. Everything we do, we do because we need to do it to achieve the highest possible quality. We do that (this connects back to motivation) because it is a core principle of the project that our standards aim to be higher than large mainstream news organizations. Otherwise, what gives this project any right to claim the credibility it automatically lacks, by virtue of being staffed by volunteers, over a blog or citizen journalism site, including those that lack a review system entirely (BTW, Wikinews has far outlasted most of its peers among 2000s citizen journalism projects). We should be doing the best work we can, allowing the project to slowly grow its userbase and therefore output, and become "successful" (which I think people's judgement of is also influenced too much by "ratings", frankly) thus. Heavy Water (talk) 16:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Starting in mid-to-late 2008, en.WN had a steady drop in active editors.[1]
Starting in the first quarter of 2016 the net byte difference plummeted.[2]
Starting in the first quarter of 2016 the number of edited pages plummeted in a similar pattern.[3]
New registered users has been mostly trending down since 2006, but steadily since 2020.[4]

I'm not sure what ratings you object to being used to judge our success. What statistics or ratings would you suggest we use to judge our growth and success?

Do you feel like the project is energized? —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 17:57, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The last three of those datasets are influenced by bot and other malicious activity — unfortunately we don't have any up-to-date statistics on publications per month, as far as I know — but they vaguely capture the long-term downward trends by those metrics since around 2011, and particularly since before the modern review system was introduced. To expand on what I said, I think volume of output, viewership, and activity are popularly perceived as far better measures of project success than they really are. "Do you feel like the project is energized": Actually, relative to a year ago, it is. Enough? No. But like I was saying, torching the system might produce great short-term results, but in the long run I think it would destroy the project from the inside (and we can't truly reverse course once we've corroded our reputation). Myself, I know I'd have no motivation to continue contributing if the community gutted the review system like this. Heavy Water (talk) 20:48, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Heavy Water

Yes I propose if news is fresh and 5W is answered correctly we need to publish it for now.

I don't propose it as permanent change but I think it's worth a try for around three months to see what comes out of it. I still think that other aspects like NPOV need to be kept just verifying each sentence takes too much effort.

Whether it is in form "don't check the rest after 5W" or "if you didn't verify a sentence within first 10 minutes of review, cut it out" I don't know. The current 'verify 100% and await author to fix' does not work. It means news is not that fresh by time of publishing.

I'm seeing 95% of news in mainstream media don't even say the date or say it incorrectly so I think it could be worth a try here.

I am interested to know what you think? Gryllida (talk) 22:58, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Heavy Water I want to add that there are two options

1. what i proposed above "verify 5W and nothing else; publish"

2. another version "verify 5W, carry on verifyingvthe rest, but instead of asking the author to fix and waiting for article to die, just delete unverifiable content and proceed to publish"

Please let me know if either of these options is acceptable to you. It is fine if both are unacceptable. I just want to know.

My main concern currently is that many users write and reviewers availability is very lacking which is very demotivating.

Other approaches:

Increase reporting of hyper local events. Wikipedia does not have this.
Increase original reporting. Wikipedia also does not have this.

I encourage you to join WN:IRC and install "Quassel Client (Client only, not Monolithic)", it is a software allowing you to read IRC chat history from when your PC was offline. Message me on IRC (my nick is 'gry') if any questions.

Please confirm you received this message and what you think?

Regards, 🙂 Gryllida (talk) 09:26, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

afaik,TOG also ditched npov. if my suggestion goes ahead,there will be remaining problem, authors not fixing raised npov issues. I don't know what to do about that.

Option 4: actively encourage contributors to write short stories (101-150 words, not more than 3 sources) to ease reviewing load. So recent story of Israel acknowledging death of leader of Hamas would be expected to be shorter, responses from either side would be summarized in 4-5 words without all the specific detail that causes delays. This would unfairly bias contributors who write good and long news arricles, but as they are at disadvantage anyway by not being reviewed... Gryllida (talk) 09:59, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wikiwide Gryllida (talk) 09:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@CheatCodes4ever Gryllida (talk) 10:00, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Mooreheadmimi Gryllida (talk) 10:01, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Leaderboard Gryllida (talk) 10:01, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

┌───────────────────────┘
User:Heavy Water said: You can't, as you (Michael) tried to, order the core review standards by importance. The review standards are already organized in a hierarchy of importance. Three are core policy: Neutrality, Verifiability, and Copyright.[5] The other two are guidelines. If there is any wiggle room in changing the review process easily, without changing core policies, it would be in the guidelines.

I personally am not in favor of "gutting" the review system. I also don't agree that merely checking the 5Ws and not checking every sentence is viable. My experience with reviewing Israel confirms death of Hamas leader in Gaza has proven the importance of a rigorous review system to me. But our current review process combined with too few active reviewers is also demonstrably not viable. It might be possible to retain a majority, if not all of our current review system if we move some of the workload 'up stream' by requiring authors to use {{verify}} and similar, to-be-developed, temporary markup that facilitates the review process. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:01, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Retaining the "no plagiarism, 5Ws answered, npov" would already put the site ahead of 99.99% of other news sources. I think minor inaccuracies are acceptable.

I agree with you that political articles are more controversial and aligning with npov is difficult. It is worthwhile checking each sentence of what they write because politicians lie more than an average person.

I mentioned earlier that it can help to have real time communication with someone who can readily assist to fix issues with an article, then publishing more quickly becomes possible, so I think having some working real time app for you would help; I'm open to any apps that generate instant notification on both of our devices when we exchange messages. Thank you. Gryllida (talk) 18:31, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Michael, as far as I'm aware there is no de facto distinction between them in importance (and to demonstrate the looseness with which those labels are connected to actual importance, as we're all aware WN:NPOV is a policy yet we adhere to conventions WN:Neutrality, an essay, documents). Otherwise I agree with this comment.

Gryllida: I have no idea where you got the "99.99%" figure from. Nor does it matter what "other news sources" do. For the record, my practice has always been to cut unverifiable information unless it is needed to answer the 5Ws and H (and mention I did so in the review comments if there was a lot). I support recommending reviewers do that instead of pursuing reporters to address any verifiability issues. I don't support anyone trying to turn en.wn into a platform for anything less than the most rigorous and rigorously reviewed reporting possible, under deadlines. Heavy Water (talk) 21:16, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Heavy Water

Yes I also cut out unverified information unless it's part of 5W. Better than to ask author to fix it and then wait for a week.

Do you have access to scoop? Gryllida (talk) 21:34, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note that ideally information would be verified and digged out, one of people I discussed news with said that a good news source is supposed to not be shallow. I think cutting out unverified information is only because there is lack of human hours available. Gryllida (talk) 00:36, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Man_drives_car_into_crowd_of_people,_killing_35_in_southern_China

I hope this is not stale, it happened Monday night, thanks. BigKrow (talk) 17:31, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @BigKrow It became stale. Sorry. I am trying to increase my availability. I may need some technical assistance with it, please check the last section on my talk page. Thank you. Gryllida (talk) 18:28, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Heads-up to other reviewers

This is just a heads-up to other reviewers that I likely will not have time at all this week to review articles. I suspect that if I do have much time, it will be sporadic and insufficient to provide a review.

I received a request to review 2024 ARPS Conference. That author may be available to work with and make changes to the article in order to avoid delay in getting it published. It also appears to be WN:OR but is not labeled as such. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:17, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I asked at talk page what exclusive content is involved. Unfortunately, the reporter did not take photos of opening or closing ceremony or a keynote. It seems to me something a reporter would do in such situation. I will continue to watch the talk page of the article and the newsroom. Have a good week. Gryllida (talk) 18:26, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]